BBC4TV showed a wonderful film about the American folk singer-songwriter, Woody Guthrie.
Here is the webpage for the film
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00048qp
Guthrie was active during the 1940s and 1950s.
His early life in the Oklahoma dust bowl (1936) provided a formative experience and a political radicalisation.
The dust bowl crisis is usually presented the collapse of farming prices devolving from of the natural disaster of high winds and drought. The effects of high winds were certainly made worse as the consequences of modern farming methods; but, as Guthrie observed, the crisis was really a debt (banking) crisis, for ordinary people.
In order to remain economic, family farms had been obliged, during the 1920s, to scale up and mechanise their activities. In order to help them, the banks provided loans. The dust bowl crisis allowed the banks to foreclose their loans and to appropriate land as an asset class…this is basically the classic enclosure play-book of capital enclosure and exclusion.
The removal of land rights made thousands of people destitute and homeless and provoked a massive migration, across the US, towards California.
Guthrie’s response to this was to write, This Land is Our Land (1940), a song played at Obama’s presidential confirmation….and a song, whose verses are known by every American school child.
Guthrie was able to leverage the power of his songs through radio performance and became the founding figure in a form of radicalised popular culture and the singer-songwriter counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s….see for example, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Joni Mitchell etc etc…Guthrie turned songwriting into a social practice and a method of action.
The circumstances of the dust bowl crisis and rural poverty in the US were well documented by photographers and artists associated with FDR’s Works Progress Administration. The best known photographers of the WPA are probably Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White and Walker Evans.
During WW2, Guthrie aligned himself with the anti-fascist movement…and even painted his guitar with the slogan, this machine kills fascists…